Perch @perchingpath@eldritch.cafe

Gayfeather, colic-root, rattlesnake-master, blazing star,( devil's bite, Cahaba torch, prairie-pine,) I took your list to that fireworks store in Upland, gathered & checked off each rocket, then imagined how you'd stare at a forest fire (guilty? gleeful?) as I put them all back.

Even at 12g I sometimes push jewelry into a piercing then have trouble navigating it to its egress. What a tiny, intimate space to get lost in.

I was queued to buy a broom and the dude ahead asked if I was setting up my college apartment, unwittingly forming a precisely opposed symmetry with the coworker who asked if I had any kids in school yet when I was 19.

Feeling grateful to adolescent ersatz-boy me for keeping her old stuffed animals around with a lesser exertion of the mulish resolve that kept her hair long & her nails polished.

When a devil inhabits a goat, you know that's a devil who wants to be beautiful.

I guess in ten years I see myself binding randomly selected & trimmed paper in embossed roadkill leather. Just haunting the highway shoulders, maybe breaking into office buildings with a pressure-washer full of chromium wastewater from the tanning? I really don't have firm plans.

Private slapstick update: Managed to whip the soup-laden tail of a slurped udon strand up behind my glasses to flick myself in the eye.

I can't find any conlangs with contrastive double-articulations that make tongue bifurcation a prerequisite to comprehensible speech.

I found a tangle of blood-stained rags by the side of a road. No one near, no trickled trail.
Earlier, I finally saw the local woman I've been told looks like me. She doesn't, but we walk the same way alone in public, our chins raised to an angle just short of pugnacity.

A partially incorrect & oddly defensive comment about crows from John Burroughs in 1903. Crows as barbaric rather than inhuman.

I saw someone mention they'd begun sleeping fully dressed, shoes included, after being sexually assaulted. I did the same, but never made that causative connection. Would it have been much different to think to myself, then, "This action is a result of violence"?

A belief in ghosts isn't a necessary precursor to encountering a ghost, nor is it a reliable consequence thereof.

Over the years I inhale enough powder foundation that I'm admitted to a ward specializing in the treatment of afflicted miners. "Black lung?" wheezes the patient in the next bed. "No," I croak, "they're 'natural ivory'."

Portrait from a perspective lying with me in bed watching as I'm drawn backwards without motion into a thicket.

Breach

Everyone's head falls off in the end. Doesn't matter if it's strychnine, lightning strike, or a stiletto to the back— you kick off the coil & the old bean goes for a roll. This averts ambiguity.

Hawk moths and feral parakeets have begun frequenting the garden this week. As your augur, I advise you to cultivate an air of exoticism, however false or shallow.

Spitting on my fingers to skim the dust from every leaf of the ivy.

Like a sea urchin, and the spines are knives, densely distributed, and their points have been tide-rolled against the sand, & are gone just dull enough not to prick you if you're gentle tossing & catching the urchin in your palm. Like a croquet ball. Like an apple.

She said, "Here... I brought you a surprise!" and handed me a crumpled paper bag stained & dripping with thin red fluid. It was raspberries, a real top-rank gift, but now I'm going to be all miscued for a future menacing delivery from my next stalker or whatever.